The 6-foot-3, 300-pound Newtown High graduate feels he is holding his own from a fitness and strength standpoint. It's been the X's and O's that have difficult to grasp.

"Physically I think I've prepared pretty well. I was in the weight room a lot before I came here," Cascone said recently. "But there's really no way to prepare mentally so I was really behind ."

He felt better after discovering through e-mail exchanges that ex-Nighthawks teammate
Brennan Coakley
, a freshman tight end at Penn State, was experiencing similar problems.

"I thought it might have been just me but he said he's having a really hard time with the mental part, too," Cascone said. "It's more mentally challenging. In high school you throw kids around. And now I'm here with kids that are 6-6 and 320 and I really have to make the right reads much faster so I can get my body in the right position. Because you can't really fight those kids; you've got to go around them."

In other words, Cascone can't overpower opponents anymore so he's learning how to out-smart them with improved technique.

"That's why I want to be a lot quicker," he said.

Whereas Coakley has been gaining weight since his arrival at Penn State this summer, Cascone has dropped from 320 pounds to 305, and hopes to get even lighter.

"I have a lot of fat that I can't get rid of," he admitted. "Because I'm probably going to red-shirt this year, I'm probably going to drop to 280 throughout the season and then try to rebuild with more muscle.

"My coach wanted me at 300 but I talked to him and I said, 'Is it all right if I drop down more?' "I just can't play good like that."

Cascone has been in Madison since July 6.

"We worked out in the weight room, run stadiums and go through drills with our strength and conditioning coaches," he said.

Practice commenced Aug. 9, consuming Cascone with football and only football. Double sessions were held on alternate days. Numerous meetings took up several hours each day.

"In camp, you have no free time. You don't get any free time at all. Like today, I had an hour off and I came back to my dorm and slept. Then I woke up and went back to practice," he said.

Aided by an injury, Cascone climbed to third on the depth chart. But the prospect of being red-shirted looms, and he's come to realize that sitting out this season wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing.

"I didn't know what to think about it until I just got put on the scout team. I love it," he said. "Before, it was hard to learn because when you're in the three spot you don't get many snaps. I was working off like 10 to 15 snaps in practice. Now I get 30 to 40 snaps every practice. In these two days I got better than I did in a whole week."

Cascone is expected to be available today when the Badgers host Bowling Green in their opener.

"The way I feel is that if someone goes down I'm going to be in the two spot, which means I have to rotate in. We rotate a lot because we want our tackles to be fresh. There is a slight possibility that I won't red shirt. Right now I'm not ready (to play) but hopefully in a month or two I can get myself ready," Cascone said.